Vol. 7, no. 1 (2017), 144-146 | DOI: 10.18352/rg.10205

Review of Sarah H. Jacoby, Love and Liberation. Autobiographical Writings of the Tibetan Buddhist Visionary Sera Khandro. New York: Columbia University Press 2014, 422 pp., ISBN 9780231147682

By Marianna Zanetta, Cultural Anthropology and Far Eastern Studies, Centre de Recherche sur les Civilisations de l'Asie Orientale, Paris, France

This intense and unique book introduces the life and the writings of Sera Khan- dro Künzang Dekyong Chönyi Wangmo, one of the very few Tibetan Buddhist women to produce an extensive autobiography. Also known as Dewé Dorjé, this extraordinary woman achieved a significant religious mastery as a Buddhist visionary and guru, and as Treasure revealer. We must remember that in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, a treasure revealer is a man or a woman who have produced scripture or objects – known as treasure – through visionary experi- ence, memory, or physical extraction; he or she is therefore a very important figure, with a significant amount of authority and religious charisma. The author analyses in detail the autobiographical texts through which we learn about Sera Khandro’s conversations with d.a¯kinı¯ (a female immortal, non- human being of volatile temperament that often acts as muse for spiritual prac- tice) and other deities, and we see the development of her intense relation with her guru Drimé Özer. The author’s analysis is mainly based on two previously unexamined texts written by this female religionist: a biography of her male teacher, and her own autobiography. As Jacoby states in the beginning of the work, Sera Khandro’s life narrative can be included into the Tibetan literary genre of spiritual biography or namtar (lit. full liberation); these recounts usu- ally relate the story of an individual’s path from suffering to spiritual awaken- ing. As a genre it has a distinctively Buddhist origin in the Indic Buddhist genres such as ja¯taka stories, tales of Buddha’s former lifetimes. The book develops in five chapters, preceded by an introduction and fol- lowed by a final epilogue. The book’s first chapter, ‘The Life and Times of Sera Khandro’, is a narrative of Sera Khandro’s life story as recorded in her autobi- ography, alongside with historical and contextual information about Tibetan (Lasha in particular) and Golok region local situations, added by the author to allow a better comprehension of the life story.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (3.0) Religion and Gender | ISSN: 1878-5417 | www.religionandgender.org | Uopen Journals From the second chapter on, the author focuses on Sera Khandro’s conversa- tion with several interlocutors such as land deities, d.a¯kinı¯s, and Drimé Özer, her teacher. The second chapter, ‘A Guest in the Sacred Land of Golok’, describes the peculiar relation that Sera Khandro entertained with the Golok territories, in particular through her contact with the land deities (gzhi bdag), local ter- restrial forces, and the Tibetan ancestors of the Treasure tradition. This peculiar connection, as the author extensively points out, constitutes the basis of Sera Khandro’s identity as a Treasure revealer in Golok. The third chapter, ‘D.a¯kinı¯ dialogues’, is an important and intense analysis of Sera Khandro’s laments for her inferior female body. While there is undoubtedly a reflection of her specific social background, these lamentations may also serve as a narrative strategy; past d.a¯kinı¯s and other male teachers are very attentive in responding to these laments and laud her accomplishments, and this might have been a means to assert her superior status through the words of others; this literary strategy works together with Sera Khandro’s attitude to deny these praise. Moreover, there is an evident reference to the theory of ‘relational selfhood’; here, the autobiographical subject builds his or her identity by depicting the relationships with other social actors, and the author thus shows that Sera Khandro’s identity and authority as Treasure revealer, and her religious legitimacy, depends on her relationships with her environment and her mythic references. In the final two chapters of the book, Jacoby analyses Sera Khandro’s role as a consort. In Tantric , the union of the male and the female elements is the most important path to – and symbol of – enlightenment. A special type of such a path is practiced in sexual rites, where the practitioners experience each other as a god and a goddess, and this divine couple is the culmination of the Tantric path. The book’s fourth chapter, ‘Sacred sexuality’, focuses on one of the core elements of the text, the purposes of sexuality in Tibetan Buddhist practices, and its connection with celibacy. It dwells in particular on the several conversations Sera Khandro entertained with d.a¯kinı¯s and male , (the title for a teacher of the in ), concerning the engagement in religious practices involving sexuality, with specific attention to the relations between tantric consorts and monks. Finally, the fifth chapter ‘Love Between Method and Insight’ focuses on the strong sentimental connection between Sera Khandro and Drimé Özer, in a complex relationship of longing, loving and feeling of loss. While the first part of the chapter analyses the specific ‘language of love’ employed by Sera Khan- dro in her autobiography, the second part of the chapter underline the peculiar description of her relationship with Drimé Özer as a mutual and complementary partnership. The depiction of this relationship mirrors clearly the tantric vision of complete as the union of gendered principles. These two final chapters have the great of providing a less rigid view of Tibetan Buddhist attitudes towards sexual practice, and to attenuate the more common image of such practices as impersonal and detached. The subject of Sera Khandro’s autobiography is interconnection. The process of revealing a Treasure (a scripture, an artifact or a vision) always involves a complex network of conditions called ‘auspicious connection’ (tendrel); thus, the autobiographies of such figures are filled not only with specific indications about their discovery, but also with introspective reflections on the very iden- tity of a revealer, and on the modalities in which these auspicious connections

Religion and Gender vol. 7, no. 1 (2017), pp. 144–146 145